Where are the Good Open Source Games?

Despite the impressive list of achievements of open source software, it can be argued that there have not been any world-class games created under the open source banner. Sure, several old games like Doom and Quake have been gifted to the open source community, but there are no comparable original creations in this area. One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.

The State of Game Development

On August 3, 2004, Doom 3 was officially released by iD software after four years of work by some of the most talented individuals in the gaming industry. Interviews with the development staff report that from early 2004 until the recent release, 80 hour work weeks were normal and Sunday was the only official day off in the iD offices.

It would be an understatement to say that things have changed in the gaming industry over the last twenty years. Doom 3 had a four-year development cycle and an all-star development team. This may be slightly atypical, but two-year development cycles and teams of 50 or more are commonplace these days. In 1984, the average Atari 2600 video game was created by one programmer in three months. A banner title might involve two or three programmers and an artist working over a six month period.

So why do games take so long to bring to market these days?

There are some obvious answers to this question. Games today are many times more complex than games were even a few years ago. Recreating every three-dimensional point of a complex cave environment is going to take an artist several orders of magnitude more time than dropping a few rough dots on an Atari 2600’s 196×160 screen and calling it a cave environment. Similarly, producing a full 5.1 surround sound track for a modern game requires sound engineers and advanced programming libraries. Triggering a few blips and bleeps is much easier.

But there are also some less obvious reasons for longer development cycles. In the old days, a programmer with a text editor and a few programs could create an entire game. However, to create all the complex content and code required for a modern game, programmers and artists need powerful tools such as 3-d modelers and advanced debuggers. Unfortunately, programmers and artists often have to use general purpose tools that are not at all well suited to game development. And when domain-specific tools do exist, such as in console game development, the tools are often unstable and immature due to the short life span of any particular console system. A multi-platform console world further complicates development by multiplying all of the issues of developing for a single platform by the number of platforms on which you intend to deliver your game.

But through all of this, one very important thing hasn’t changed much. In 2004, just like in 1984, most players buy a game, play it for a while, and then move on. With the exception of a few genres, the lifespan of a single title is very short. The number of hours required for a brand new player to finish “Super Mario Bros.” and “Metal Gear Solid 2” are about equal. But the amount of man hours that went into the creation of each is not even comparable.

Open Source is not an Advantage in Game Development

It is clear that building a top-quality game is harder than ever. The amazing amount of work required, the short schedules, and the need for experts in many domains all combine to make game development one of the most challenging areas of software development. Will developing a game as open source make things easier?

Open source works best as a development model when the useful lifespan of an application is very long. It allows many users to benefit from the application and provides an opportunity for users to become volunteer developers, thus furthering the project. The continued interest of the public drives the developers long after personal interest or utility has faded. This is the state of maximum efficiency for open source and provides two huge advantages over closed development: Users give back to the project and developers can directly build top of all of the code that has gone before them. Unfortunately, neither of these advantages exist in a meaningful way for open source games.

Most games, by their very nature, have a relatively short lifespan. This is natural. A game provides the user with an experience, but ultimately the user moves on. Since a single user is only interested in the game for a short period of time, it is unlikely that they will contribute much back to the open-source project.

In a modern game, the majority of work is involved in creating the art and story assets, not the programming. While there are plenty of open source game engines around, the bulk of a game must be created from scratch. Creating world class art and music is hard and you can not build on what has gone before you in the same way that you can with software. You can take the code for an algorithm, improve it, and use it to solve a problem. You can’t directly take a musical score from an older game, change a few notes, and have a better score. You will just have an odd piece of music that sounds like a poor version of the original.

Let’s use the real-world example of Doom 3. Could this be developed more efficiently as an open source project?

The artists at iD software put hours of work into creating and testing each and every room, pipe, box, or bloody corpse in Doom 3. This is comparable to the hours of work a developer would invest in creating and testing each and every function in a spreadsheet’s math library.

Now, just like testing each spreadsheet function, the artists must continually test each room in the game to make sure textures line up, the scripted actions trigger, the difficulty is appropriate, and so on.

Unfortunately, “content-based” games are a one-time experience. A user can’t experience a game on an emotional level if she is playing through the same level hundreds of times to see minor improvements and new features.

A spreadsheet developer can release a new beta version to testers every week to get feedback on how well the new functions he has implemented perform for the users. The users appreciate the progress and and application becomes more valuable to them with each release.

A game instead becomes less relevant with each minor release. The user pool has experienced it and has already moved on. The developer gets very little benefit from users contributing back to the project because most users do not stay interested in the project for very long.

Doom 3 was quite playable half way through its development cycle. That means with two years of full-time development left, in an open source world, players would already be playing it. Two years is a long time in the gaming world. It would be very hard to keep any sort of public interest alive with weekly test releases where the only change might be that a weapon was tweaked, a room was added halfway through the game, the lighting was adjusted, or load time was slightly reduced. From the audience perspective, games don’t get better gradually. That would be like expecting the general public to sit through the same movie every week for two years as the editing was tuned and small scenes were gradually added. Not only would the audience not enjoy it, they would also be likely to riot after about six months of showings.

The other main advantage of open source is the ability to build on existing code and art. Now imagine that the developers for our open source Doom 3 can take the art from Doom 2 to use as a base for Doom 3. But this isn’t very useful. The artist can’t load the art for an Imp monster circa 1993 into The GIMP, apply a filter, and suddenly have an amazing 3-d model with bump mapping. In fact, the only area of game development where reuse is a major advantage is the ability to use an existing game engine. But most closed source developers already do this.

Some might argue that the rise of the Creative Commons Share Alike license in the art community might create a pool of art and music that open source game developers can draw from. At a high level, that is true. But almost all games need music, sound effects, and art custom designed to fit the needs and overall feel of the game. Otherwise, the end result will be a game that looks and sounds like a hundreds of sound clips and pictures put into a blender set on puree.

So does Open Source make sense for games?

World-class game development is hard and getting harder every day. Open source development has many advantages over closed development in many cases. However, these advantages become largely null when developing cutting-edge games. As a result, it is very difficult to finish such a large undertaking using the open source development model.

Closed source development also has many advantages. Among those is the ability to attract high-caliber individuals and allow them to focus directly on a project for two or more years at a time, without worrying how they will pay their bills. The level of talent may be very high in the open source community, but most individuals can not afford to spend two years without interruption on one project without compensation, especially one that has a very short useful lifespan when completed.

It is important to weigh the advantages of each model of development before choosing how to approach a particular project. In many cases, an open source approach may yield many gains, but high-end game development is generally not one of those cases.

Where does Open Source fit in gaming?

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. Open source might not be the best choice for developing the next so-called “AAA level” story-based shooter, but it works pretty well for games with unusually long lifespans. And that is exactly where projects like this have succeeded wildly. Examples include BZFlag, FreeCiv, and FrozenBubble. You can also include the entire multi-player Game Modding community in this category. That is a great example of playing off of the strengths of open development, while avoiding many of the pitfalls.

It is also possible that someone might come along and turn the open source development system on its head. One attempt that comes to mind is the HappyPenguin Game of the Month model. Each month, volunteers take an existing open source game and try to flesh it out into a finished product as quickly as possible. While this is a new idea and success has been mixed, projects like this might eventually stumble on a development model that works.

188 Comments

Nethack beats anything the world of closed source has to offer. Sure, it’s not flashy and full of rapidly aging graphical tricks, but the gameplay is second to none.

Open Source games focus on being addictive and fun to play, not on marketing like DOOM3, which, lets face it, is extremely boring and samey once you get over the fact it renders dank dusty dungeons with 20% more polygons than last year’s blockbuster. Yawn.

I’ve never really found any closed source games that are particularly fun to play after a week or so. I suppose there were some good ones in the 80s and early 90s, but since then there’s been little originality and less focus on gameplay. This is why the games industry is heading towards a crash, really, it can’t produce interesting content anymore. People aren’t going to cause riots getting the next mario release like they did in the 80s, when gaming was an innovative new social trend.

For these reasons I think OSS will come to rule the world of gaming. Gaming is rapidly becoming commoditised, unoriginal, and little fun. OSS it excellent and focusing on fun, and will catch up with the rest in time. Then gaming will be yet another victim of the success of OSS.

2004-08-31 8:33 pm

“One should not expect this situation to change anytime soon, because the open source development model does not make sense for game development.”

Is this some sort of preemptive strike against OSS games or something? Because I just don’t see the point of this article.

In fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard that the OSS model would work for big budget, big graphics gaming. Not once in the 7 years that I’ve been using OSS did I see someone point at Doom II or Quake III or now with Doom 3 and say “We can make the same thing but better via OSS!!” when the games first came out.

The place of OSS in gaming is possibly providing Free tools to code with, a Free Stable platform to code on, and maybe some actual code via SDL or ogg.

So yes, your right. OSS isn’t the perfect vechile for creating big budgest, highly successful, marketing driven games. Didn’t we all know that already? You did your research I just think this seems to be a two page answer to a question that didn’t need to be asked.

2004-08-31 8:34 pm

I think from your point of view you are correct. OSS will come to rule the particular world of gaming you enjoy – text based dungeon crawls. It already does.

However, this article is specifically about the world of high-end games and I think that is the area where OSS does not make sense.

2004-08-31 8:35 pm

Rab,

you are talking fanatically and without objectivity.

Nethack is great for what it is –my husband loves it too– but it is like trying to learn VIM or Emacs. People who play games, don’t want to study a whole encyclopedia before they start playing a game. It is not for everyone, in fact it is for VERY FEW people, even if Nethack is on the same par of GOOD open source development projects like Apache, PostgreSQL or Subversion.

And I don’t think that “Open Source games focus on being addictive and fun to play”. Most open source games are just games, designed by amateurs, who just learning some C and some SDL programming, or who just want to re-implement a game they loved once in their Amiga or their Windows PC.

But the reality is, as the article explained, that the times CHANGE. Market-quality games DO become harder and harder to develop every day because of the complexity in the AI and graphics. OSS can never –ever– beat a good commercial game that took 2-3 years to make for a closed team working full time together, every day and researching on the same time for better algorithms.

You can disagree all you want, and give us poor examples like nethack (which I agree is great, but not for most people), but reality is, where is the Black&White in the OSS world? Where is DungeonKeeper or SimCity etc? Nowhere. These games are so complex and involve so many different skills, that the OSS model just doesn’t work as well as a company-model would do.

2004-08-31 8:38 pm

“For these reasons I think OSS will come to rule the world of gaming”

Well I guess at least one person thinks so but let me say again that this isn’t common thought among OSS backers. People wishing to argue with this person should realize that he doesn’t represent the majority of OSS users.

Says you. If you can’t find a single game to play for more than one week and you really think that all modern games suck I have a shocking suggestion for you. Your NOT a gamer *gasp*. I know you probably didn’t know this but its true. Stick to nethack and hearts and leaving the gaming to the people who still enjoy it.

2004-08-31 8:40 pm

Where are the games?

….simple

Where is the $$$$$$

2004-08-31 8:47 pm

Is “Black and White” any more complicated than KDE? Gnome? The Linux kernel? I don’t think it is, really. Plus, I was really thinking longer term. Games these days just aren’t particularly original, and the programming is the least of the effort involved. You use your off the shelf 3D engine, you have an off-the-shelf genre, and so on.

Commercial games can maintain a lead up to now purely because games depend on pushing the technological envelope much more than eg a wordprocessor or VCS system does. The games of this year have to be slicker and faster than the games of last year, and that requires enromous investment in new technologies every release cycle that only commercial companies can afford, at this pace.

However, I don’t think things will stay this way. I think the bottom is falling out of the games market, simply because that progress is unsustainable. It’s a question of the law of diminishing returns. DOOMI was much, much more impressive and jawdropping than what went before. DOOM3 is like what went before, but a little slicker. Enormous investments in software and hardware advances are reaching a point where most gamers don’t really notice all *that* much of a difference over their first 3D playstation I games. Transform&Lighting is much less impressive an advance that having 3D at all, and the next cycle of advances in games promise to be even less exciting. Add to that the dearth of decent, groundbreaking new ideas in the gaming world, and enough time, and I forsee a situation where OSS can indeed catch up very well with the world of commercial software, simply because the technological lead will no longer be relevant, and time will allow many of the exciting projects in OSS gaming today to mature, and mature, and mature..

2004-08-31 8:49 pm

The author of the article and everybody else seems only talking about shooting games and similar ones. I agree that for those games the OSS may not be the best model, but there are other games. For example, consider flight simulators. There are a lot of them and they are very good. Just to list some:

Thing is, the author of the article is right. It takes a large team a long time to create commercial grade games. That is why the open source model relies on a community effort and in some cases (such as Wesnoth and to a lesser degree Vega Strike) this has happened.

The more people that are aware of the open source model, then the more people that will attach themselves to communities and improve games that they like. It’s all about market saturation, and the open source market just isn’t saturated enough just yet. I’ve a feeling things are picking up though, from the momentum I’ve observed over the last few years, and that in 2-3 years time we may be talking differently about a core of excellent open source games that are solid and polished.

2004-08-31 8:52 pm

Anyone how thinks that open source games don’t work should try “Battle for Wesnoth”. It rocks!

2004-08-31 8:53 pm

I actually have noticed something. Being in college in the CS dep, the people who want to make games and are big gamers tend to use windows and know very little about how their system works. They are usually very inventive and with the training they get I have no doubt they will be excellent game designers, but they are just not playing in the same arena as most of the OSS people. Likewise, most of the OSS people I meet are not big gamers and have pretty much 0 interest in devoting their time to creating a really great game.

To me, this whole argument about the OpenSource model being good or bad for games is useless and has nothing to do with why there arn’t many great OpenSource games. Its just simply that most Open Source programmers don’t want to make them.

2004-08-31 8:53 pm

>Is “Black and White” any more complicated than KDE? Gnome? The Linux kernel?

Maybe not more complicated than the Linux kernel (which has huge contribution by companies anyway), but possibly more complicated by KDE/Gnome, yes.

But in any way, games are different than system software. System software does not change as much as 3D algorithms and 3D hardware do. To create a modern game, you need all the latest and greatest knowledge and beta 3D hardware and lots — I mean lots– of good testing. To create a modern OS, you just need an i686 and some freely available code from research OSes. However, the knowledge and hardware to get involved to an OS development is more readily available to people, than a *modern* game knowledge and hardware is. It also requires people with different skills than just coders: artists, level designers, pro testers. So, it’s just different kind of development.

BTW, please use the right subject when replying.

2004-08-31 8:53 pm

If you notice something about all the big successful OSS games, they have one thing in common, and that thing is strategy. Freeciv, Nethack, and Battle of Wesnoth are all strategy games, and only the last has any kind of story. Thus, with a game that can and should be played many many times, then the OSS model works, as users will stick around. However, if your game is based off of one story line, yes closed source will fail.

And on another, slightly related point, OSS is very good for making engines and the like, and providing the framework. Thus the Doom3 people would have just had to write a great story wrapper around a already great OSS engine that is used in a great many games.

Corey

2004-08-31 8:54 pm

Where are the games?

….simple

Where is the $$$$$$Do you honestly think that a lot of open-source/Free software programmers do it for money? If you ask a lot of programmers who do F/OSS coding (me being including in that group), you’ll soon come to know that (for the most part anyway), many programmers do it solely for reputation’s sake: It helps them get a good rep among the hacker community and they do it because they like doing it. And with that said, take a look at what companies like Red Hat, Novell (with SuSE, Ximian, etc.), Apple (with the Darwin-based OS X), Sun (with StarOffice/OpenOffice.org) and IBM (with their Eclipse IDE, etc.) are doing. Things like these are open-source, yet they (the companies) are making money, even profit, on these F/OSS things. Heck, Havoc Pennington, one of the Lead GNOME/Metacity developers, and Alan Cox, one of the head Linux kernel devs, are employed by RH iirc.

None of you understand the author I am afraid. We are talking about MODERN games, that if there was a kind of contest, these games would be able to compete at ALL levels of design to their commercial counterparts. There is NOT ONE OSS game today that can compete straight head to head with a commercial counterpart!

Is Simutrans good enough? Yes.

Is BzFlag good enough? Yes.

Is Frozen Bubble good enough? Yes.

But when you compare them with their commercial counterparts for consoles or Windows, these OSS games are so mid-nineties that it isn’t funny anymore.

2004-08-31 9:00 pm

rab: I completely disagreed with you, but I must say that your final post makes some excellent points.

All: I think that OSS games lag behind as well because the quality OSS games that exist (lbreakout2, frozen bubble, bzflag) are less about technology and more about fun, whether or not they are copies of earlier games, I really do.

So, if OSS is destined to be used for games, it will be in a more classic OSS style: several developers will come out with a good 3d game engine/API which would allow another set of devs to create some different, configurable AI plugins, and still other to write a story, others to work on art and others to bring the whole thing together. None of these working specifically in concert with the others.

A gaming development community that places a premium on glitz and glamour will only come into being the way the Linux base came into being: by gradually picking up steam and getting set of useable tools in place to help along the way…

The new gtk = GamerTK.

2004-08-31 9:01 pm

Scorched Earth is a great OSS remake of a classic DOS game. It has been completely remade into 3D with OpenGL graphics. It features beautiful water, destructible terrain, and mutliplayer online and LAN gaming! Sure, it’s no big budget game, but it brought back some great memories, and is way better than the original imho.

2004-08-31 9:01 pm

There may not be any truly FOSS games out there that can compete with commercial titles, but there is a HUGE modding community which I believe fills the void quite well.

2004-08-31 9:02 pm

…for hosting an article that was professionally written and seems to be exclusive to OSNews, Eugenia.

On the subject of open source gaming, I would have to agree with the author – game programming is unlike application programming; it is in all odds there will be no long-term use that will generate lots of useful feedback while developing an open-source game and users will definitely get bored of “relatively the same thing” over and over and over again…

There are exceptions, though, I’d say: simulations (strategy, flight, racing) and puzzle-games (think, BeJeweled) seem to be the most likely canidate for a successful open source game to really shine in, because these games appeal to hardcore gamers who appreciate the tweaking under the hood; it really shows in these models, where a slight change in physics or unit stats can mean an entirely different experience.

2004-08-31 9:07 pm

Where are the good closed source games? I think I can count all the good ones that have come out in the past several years with 2 hands, and sorry .. but Doom 3 ain’t one of them either.

2004-08-31 9:09 pm

…the gameplay, but the graphics and animation a top seller today must have. i’m not talking about coding skills: the roots of coding-skills for games are in the demo-scene.

i’m talking about professional made animations, graphics, textures, audio…. it takes a lot of time and human resources to develop a top-seller. but you do not need only human resources (oh, i hate this word) but also expensive equipment. if you have a look at the credits of todays games, you will see, that there are lots of people and equipment involved in game development nowadays. sometimes it’s like producing a film.

so the problem is the lack of money, not the skills of the people involved.

If you try to model the commercial method of game development, yes its true it would be hard to do open source games. But open source offers more freedom in development models. What if games were developed in chapters like a book, with cliffhangers at the end of those chapters. Or if you could create new worlds/towns in an RPG that your character could explore. You could then re-use code build upon what was good in that chapter/world and make it better. A good game that constantly evolves could possibly make the best game ever. You sort of see this happening with mods with games like Counter Strike. Thus a good start would be to develop an opensourced gaming engine ang go from there.

2004-08-31 9:15 pm

One of the skills lacking in oss game coders seems to be AI, i’ve never played any oss game that had even half decent AI, this completely takes away any gameplay pleasure. Maybe it’s the reason most oss games focus on multiplayer.

Even if the gx are ok, it feels like your playing against a braindead chicken. A long way from games like no one lives for ever 2 or Tron 2.0.

2004-08-31 9:16 pm

Two simple ruless:

1. Closed-source model makes sense especially when doing high-end 3D games development in the fast-paced game business. Everybody gains (developers and users alike) and nobody loses. Also, people wanting to develop and support 100% open-sourced games will always have their fair chances too – if only they manage to develop good enough products.

2. Open source mmodel makes sense especially when developing operating systems for general use. Everybody gains (developers and users alike) and nobody loses. Also, closed source operating systems will always have their share of the OS market too – if only they manage to develop good enough products.

There may be, of course, lots of mixed cases too, also in OS and game worlds, but generally, I think, the above rules remain mostly true.

2004-08-31 9:17 pm

i totally agree. the main point imho is that games are consumable entertainment.

that’s why there won’t be an open source film. because ppl watch it once, maybe twice, and that’s it. no more. same goes for games. you buy doom3, play it for few weeks (after spending a fortune on a new graphics card), and stack it somewhere. the game is entering this hall of fame or another, and then forgotten. apache, ohoh, is used daily as an _infrastructure_ application. that’s a whole different game (pardon the words game).

it’s quite different with games that have some lasting appeal. those ‘quickies’ u can play for 10 mins after lunch (frozen bubble, solitair, schorch 3d, etc). simulations, etc. that’s where OSS shines (or at least can )

OSS is good for infrastructures, and code that lasts. no OSS dev will write code that ppl will use for a week, and then throw away (unless there’s money in it, and that’s how closed source does it).

my $0.02

avih

2004-08-31 9:17 pm

There are a lot of programmers that will program engines and things of that nature for free, but there aren’t a lot of designers (this includes UI designers) that will design for free.

2004-08-31 9:18 pm

If there was an excellent plugin-able Engine/Toolkit for building moder-looking games there would be more, higher quality OSS games.

It takes time for a community to develop around such things. It took time for GTK to become a viable platform.

In the OSS world, it’s first things first, and:

1) The core OSS OS isn’t done yet.

2) The talent to get excellent games done is out there. Remember the original Quake’s plethora of kickass mods?

3) It is just now, this year, getting to the point where a high-quality game project makes sense. Be patient.

I think soon, OSS will begin to produce better games. The process just needs to be started.

2004-08-31 9:20 pm

Hi, after contributing for months to Battle for Wesnoth, I can definitely state that “free software” development model is great for game development.

I agree when the author says that games require a great effort, but looking at games like Battle for Wesnoth, where lots of people are contributing, engines like CrystalSpace, and several other projects I’m sure great FOSS games will arrive in next year. And once that games and engines are here, people will be free to reuse art, 3d models, code, … to enhance other games and write new ones.

(back to play Battle for Wesnoth )

2004-08-31 9:23 pm

> Hi, after contributing for months to Battle for

> Wesnoth, I can definitely state that “free software”

>development model is great for game development.

You should only say this if you actually have experience working on a commercial game studio company too. If you don’t have such experience, then don’t say that “FOSS is great for game development”, because you have only seen on side of the coin, not both.

2004-08-31 9:25 pm

TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator) was made by some friends of mine.

It’s a GPLed racing car simulator (surprised, heh?) based on PLib and OpenGL.

Maybe there aren’t any good FOSS games because it takes too much effort and not enough rewards? The thing with FOSS tools is that once they are somewhat working, you can use them right away. If they’re missing features, you can add them later, or maybe others can add them. With a game, you have to have all the content done before it’s enjoyable. I think the content is what keeps us from seeing great games, although to be honest I haven’t looked around for any open source games. Back in the good ol’ days of BBSing, I wrote a few door games. For me, the fun in making them was the design and coding. When it came time to make the content, I just was not that interested. I got it done, but it was painful. I’m not sure how easy it is to convince artists and writers to come up with original content for free. Perhaps it’s the hacker element that drives people to write game engines, and that is missing when it comes to the content?

2004-08-31 9:32 pm

Get an X-Box, then you have games, DVD player and you can slap Gentoox on it. There you are, good to go.

2004-08-31 9:35 pm

He’s right. Virtually all the worthwhile OSS games are blantant copies of commercial games. If Taito, etc. cared, doubtless they could shut ’em down without much trouble.

2004-08-31 9:38 pm

But then again, there are very few original games made, period.

I don’t think the OSS model is at fault.

2004-08-31 9:42 pm

Personally while I’d say that the closed source games currently rule in terms of 3D glitz and animations (and that’s only until open source tools for creating these get faster and easier to use — see things like http://www.povray.org/ and the various front-ends that are being built for it to see the future of open source game graphics) the OSS games rule in terms of playability and story. Someone before mentioned NetHack: http://www.nethack.org/ and that it’s got better gameplay than anything in the closed source world. If a DOOM3 style front-end were built for it, it would hands-down beat out anything else in that genre of gaming, open or closed source. Consider also XConq: http://sources.redhat.com/xconq/ for an open source app that’s got a better engine than most and is just looking for a good front-end (there are already a few available but none that measure up to today’s current standards of animated graphics). Look at Adonthell: http://adonthell.linuxgames.com/ for an example of an open source game with a decent story behind it (or look at virtually any of the hundreds of titles of interactive fiction from the IF Archive: http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html for open source games that are pure story). Look at Parsec: http://www.parsec.org/ for an open source game that competes pretty well in all areas…

2004-08-31 9:47 pm

oss can be good model for development of games.

i do think companies would benefit if engines were GPLed.

they usually buy engines anyway.

and i think the whole idea to contribute rather than to make everything from scratch would work for the reuseable parts (like engines)

but storyline, graphics, maps etc should remain a property of a company that created them.

of course anyone could create their own design/graphics/etc and make it public but

i guess it takes time and lots of resources.

i remember freecraft was a bit more advanced that warcraft2 but its graphics was awful.

2004-08-31 9:54 pm

Eugenia said:

You should only say this if you actually have experience working on a commercial game studio company too. If you don’t have such experience, then don’t say that “FOSS is great for game development”, because you have only seen on side of the coin, not both.

I have only said that it’s great not that is better (even if I think it’s better ), BTW, if you haven’t been in any of the sides you shouldn’t say anything at all

With the world of Open-Source Software Development gaining ground, PC game development will become one of its primary victims. Nearly all games are huge productions that operate more like a motion picture production than they do as a word processor in development. Games today are costing 10-30 million dollars each to produce. Most game developers do not want to be force to spend 10-30 million to develop a game and its engine(or license), then be force to make it available for free do to GPL mandates. Most software developers don’t want to develop on the Linux platform and have to develop multiple incarnations of the same game because you have dozens(soon to be hundreds) of package managers to deal with(Autopackage won’t realy help with the current state of the Linux community) and get little or no income from them(especially the smaller Package Mangers).

The most successful games in open source are the simple ones, the ones based on arcade, boardgame, computer/video game classics that have a have a high replayablity factor. Games like Tetris, Poker, Missile Command, Bomberman, Checkers etc.

With video game consoles existing as closed sourced environments, they offer a better future for game developers for a multitude of reasons. They don’t have to deal with GPL, each console platform has only 1 hardware configuration, piracy is less of an issue, and PC hardware is just to expensive to validate to most people to use as a gaming platform. Besides the last great advantage that the PC’s had in online play has been put to rest in the current consoles on the market.

In the end its best for major game development to leave the world of PC and fully embrace the advantages of the video game console. Besides, most people are fed up installing games on their computer that takes up 2 or 3 gigs of space and still have to use the Game CD to play the game.

2004-08-31 10:27 pm

A large chunk of game development is plot development and art creation. Besides, Wesnoth rocks hardcore.

2004-08-31 10:29 pm

Stamina counts, too. If you want a successful game you have to be willing to go the distance – willing is a subjective term, too. Closed-source gaming studios are willing to go that distance because at the end of that rain-bow is some sweet, sweet cash prizes.

Someone linked to Adonthell. The last developer diary was almost 9 months ago. The screenshots gallery is broken. The last news update was less than a month after the developer diary update. It reeks of death and decay.

Stamina counts – this is simply a fact of the development cycle. With an OSS project, its really easy to just “drop it” and not feel bad – the source is there, other people can contribute, right? Adonthell doesn’t look so healthy to me, though. Nobody’s got the stamina to keep working on it for whatever reason.

Closed source developers will always have this stamina as long as the money’s still coming.

Cha-CHING!

2004-08-31 10:31 pm

You are living in a dream Chris. What does this mean that “not developer’s fault”? We are discussing why OSS games are not as good as commercial ones. You say that design and art is part of the gaming creation, and that’s true. But doesn’t that mean that art/design is not as good for OSS, and while not developers’ fault, the end result is the same?

So, if you are to say that “the school is not clean but it is not the teacher’s fault, it’s the janitor’s”, isn’t the end result the same? School is not clean no matter whose fault is, and that’s what matters to consumers/students.

2004-08-31 10:31 pm

“You should only say this if you actually have experience working on a commercial game studio company too. If you don’t have such experience, then don’t say that “FOSS is great for game development”, because you have only seen on side of the coin, not both.”

Your logic is false. A statement that something is good or great is not necessarily comparitive, he didn’t say better or greater. You can say product X is good, while product Y may in fact be better the fact that X is good remains true and un-negated(sic).

1990 – “Ok, maybe a development environment is possible, but it’s impossible to have an operating system not developed by a great software company”

1991 – Linux appears

– Ok, may be a kernel, but not anything “serious” as Unix

1998 – Linux is mature, widely used in servers.

– “Well, it is really easy to develop an OS and mail, DNS, … servers, but Linux won’t get into the desktop”

2003 – Gnome and KDE environment rocks

2004 – “Ok, all that stuff was easy but what about games?”

2005 – Guess what

2004-08-31 10:51 pm

I just tried it. It felt very 1998, plus it’s pretty slow for what it does.

2004-08-31 10:53 pm

Go take a look at cube, or bettter yet the project im working on, it is at the moment a closed source free FPS created by a bunch of guys i know with an engine made from scratch, how much work do we have? some work on render code, and making the menus easier to use, then some network code optimization. Then that would do it. I made the textures, maps, models, etc. in about a year in my free time. Its not Doom3, but I think its at least as good as MOHAA or CS. The technology is there.

As for open sourcing, we will do it in due time, in order to allow mod makers a few more levels of depth in modification.

2004-08-31 10:54 pm

The two OSS games I play most are Armagetron and the very pretty Neverball. The latter shows what OSS does well, and it’s virtually a one man effort, which I suspect is the limit for OSS game programming. Group efforts seem to die quickly.

Story counts for a lot ( <- 2 words, count ’em 2 ). Try writing an open source novel. There’s no surprise because all it’s biggest fans had a hand in writing it. Those that didn’t, submit twists and coincidences as bug reports and wait patiently for version 0.2.

There’s little originality in OSS gaming. There’s little originality in gaming, full stop. Doom/Quake et al really do play just like the early 90’s classic that started this now-tedious phenomenon known as the FPS. It’s dissapointing because games like System Shock and Ultima Underworld showed the potential if there were more than just fighting to do.

Alas, almost everyone involved with games is an overgrown adolescant. Someone said it was like Hollywood vs Indie films, but it’s not. There’s not art in game creation, just stories of alien civilzations battling in the void. Yawn.

There is some originality out there, most notably in the mainstream (ie. Windows) freeware scene. They aren’t making big games but they are pushing the limits of genre gaming.

One more thing… why isn’t everyone busy ripping off The Sims? It was original, a huge hit and had virtually limitless possibility for story telling. People are too focused on technology and particularly graphics to see an exciting game concept when one comes along.

2004-08-31 11:01 pm

Bla, boring. Eugenia’s right–games are difficult to develop and require lots of devotion and teams of smart people. The motivation for making games is usually money oriented, and therefore OSS won’t work for making full-fledged games like the ones Rockstar Games produces (Max Payne 2, GTA Vice City, etc.).

But hackers love hacking, and WineX/Cedega is a great hack. I installed Max Payne 2 on my Linux partition and can play it at full speed on my GeForce FX5700. It surprised me, but the product actually works as advertised. Put effort into that.

Perhaps taking it a step further, using what developers have learned from Cedega, some developers could come up with a library that allows one to cross-compile DirectX games to OpenGL environments, and therefore have cross-platform games. Attempts at this may already exist, I dunno.

You don’t know games. I play both OSS and CSS games. While OSS games can be great fun, most (not all) of them are just simple games. There are only a very few complex OSS games and some of them (especially NetHack) is mentioned since … 15 years?

I can mention old games, too: Final Fantasy 6. Ever played it? It’s awsome. Japanese RPGs are the absolute story telling kings. There are no OSS games with this deep gameplay and such a great story.

2004-08-31 11:06 pm

This is extremely nieve of anyone to think OSS cannot produce full commericial grade games. Doom 3 isn’t 100% original, the tools and engines they used come from other companies. Those same tools can be created in OSS world. If ID software were to open up all those tools (implying they were the ones who wrote all the tools), then the entire community would be all over it to improve those tools and build engines that far surpass anything out else out there.

Even the article admits the real draw to games is the storyline. So there you go, with OSS tools at your disposal, a couple 3D artists, a friend from a band who can write your music, and you too can create something to rival anything else out there. All this shows is that the real seller to games is something besides the source code.

IT REALLY pisses me off when people give credit to closed source solutions. OSS is moving past the era of just trying to scratch an itch…. bah… I could go on, but I doubt this is the place for that.

2004-08-31 11:17 pm

Let’s face the fact: Siberia is NOT very complicated in the term of engine. Nothing very hard to create by some gifted OSS developers.

But find me second Benoit Sokal, who would spend all his talent to enrich this engine. As for now there is no “Free Art/Open Art”, at least among THE artists.

A.

2004-08-31 11:40 pm

One of the biggest problems any OSS game is going to have, is finding Artists/Animators/Sound Producers who are willing to donate the amount of work to make a blockbuster titile.

It’s fun and all making a skin for uber cool system resource module for KDE, but making a complete set of 3d models, animating them, lip syncing them, skinning them, etc is a totally different beast.

Certain games actually do lend themselves better to OSS then closed source, namely online games (if you could get over the hump and get one started, get a community, get someone to pay for your incredible bandwidth costs, get people to watch the game 24/7 so that people aren’t abusing or hacking you, having someone doing tech support 24/7), fun puzzle games that don’t “get old”, simulation games, such as flight sims and sports, things that people are going to spend TONS of time on playing, not sit down and play for 35 hours and then most likely put on a shelf.

One of the benefits of having an OSS game would be 1) no dead lines, you can add cool features until your hearts content (but of course people will demand a working product, crush you with demoralzing posts on your message board about how you’re game is late, there isn’t enough information etc), 2) there is no big mean publisher breathing down your neck demanding you get the game down in 3 months (when you know you need at least 6 to make it *GOOD*).

Another issue that would likely come up, is lets say you wanted to make a new incarnation of Madden NFL Football OSS, you’d most likely NEVER be able to use real players, teams, leagues etc, because you’d have to add a team of lawyers to battle it out with the NFL to give you the rights (and the subsequent 50,000 changes they “demand” in order to actually grant you those rights).

How do you let the mass market know you have a really good game out there with no advertising budget, no marketing director (to kiss the magazines ass to get a nice review, or slip the head buyer for games shops a few perks to get good shelf space)? With so much out there today, even if you have a truely good game, it can easily get lost in the media blitz (often good games lose out to hyped games, because of advertising budgets not anything related to the actual games themselves).

There are good games being created today, you just have to sort through alot of “ok/cloned/knock off/junk” before you find them. Things like DOOM3 while essentially the same game as the original DOOM1, also has alot more to offer. I think it’s similar (oh god a car comparison) to the difference between a car from 1985 to 2004, while they essentialy are the same thing, to say they are equivalent is a terrible falacy.

One area I think that OSS can really help with a game, is when a game reaches it’s sell by date, and is basically of no direct use to the commericail developer, they can release the code into the wild, which then allows fans who still love the older game to do things they may have been dying for to the game. This helps by allowing people with older systems get some new features in games, it helps build a sense of community, and in a lot of ways it can even help you find developers for the commericial side of things as well, you’d be suprised how many people get hired based upon their contributions to the community (i.e. mod makers, editor creators etc).

*GAMERS* shouldn’t be getting up in arms over how their games were developed, they should just wish for/support/help any game they truly enjoy. Whenever it becaomes a religous war about CSS/OSS it gets dumb. As a gamer I want to play good games, I could care less if Indian programmers(from India) working for IBM (who then “contributes” it to the OSS community) have provided it, or if it’s a hard working closed source company that is providing it. ENJOY THE GAMES.

I think you’re missing the point. The earlier post wasn’t talking about “good looking” but rather about underlying engines. I think it stated that the front-end for the current open-source offerings is still somewhat lacking, but that the underlying engines aren’t bad.

2004-08-31 11:59 pm

“Do you honestly think that a lot of open-source/Free software programmers do it for money? If you ask a lot of programmers who do F/OSS coding (me being including in that group), you’ll soon come to know that (for the most part anyway), many programmers do it solely for reputation’s sake: It helps them get a good rep among the hacker community and they do it because they like doing it. And with that said, take a look at what companies like Red Hat, Novell (with SuSE, Ximian, etc.), Apple (with the Darwin-based OS X), Sun (with StarOffice/OpenOffice.org) and IBM (with their Eclipse IDE, etc.) are doing. Things like these are open-source, yet they (the companies) are making money, even profit, on these F/OSS things. Heck, Havoc Pennington, one of the Lead GNOME/Metacity developers, and Alan Cox, one of the head Linux kernel devs, are employed by RH iirc. ”

You, apparently unknowingly, made my argument for me. wtg

2004-09-01 12:19 am

This article is a really bad version of Shawn Hargreaves excellent (and much bigger) essay dating from 1999 titled “Playing the Open Source Game”

the “before”, games were about programming. the people who owned these machines were geek programmers. it was little about the art as the machines were not powerfull or colourfull enough…

the “now” is ALL about art. you dont need programming. system libraries do it all for you. You can buy that nice 5.1 sound library for any platform under the sun (firelights FMod, is the best example here). graphic libraries are a dime a dozen.

you cant buy off the shelf artwork.

it takes next to no time to create an engine, but it takes months and months to create artwork.

all games these days are about the artwork, which is not something your average game making developer can create.

Open Source game development is lead by programmers, not artists. This will never change. Hence, the state of open source games wont change.

2004-09-01 12:29 am

I remember to have read an other article two or three years ago, with basically the same thesis: Games are entertainment that is consumed very quickly, and thus the OSS models doesn’t work as good as for ‘usual’ software.

Doom is a nice example that the thesis is at least partially right, IMHO.

I don’t know how many projects exists that try to improve the OpenSource’d engine. Six or seven? Amazing is just that all of them need the original wad files with the game content. There is only a single project that I know of, that tries to make open and free content for Doom.

How difficult can it be to make 32 new levels with 10 year old graphics? Obviously difficult enought that no project made it in all those years since the Doom engine was made OpenSource.

On the other hand, the number of projects trying to improve the engine shows that there is still interest in the game, maybe comparable to nethack that even older semesters than me like to play.

However, the thesis depends on its assumption so every game genre where consumption will take some time, is open to the OSS development model.

To sad that’s nothing I like.

So, artists, what are you waiting for? Christmas? 😉

2004-09-01 12:47 am

Obviously everything the article states is true if you assume two things:

1) That the game is story and content driven (as the article states)

2) That “Open Source” refers to completely free engine AND content, instead of just a free engine.

There are many good reasons why Open Source engines are a good choice for game development. A 3D engine is a 3D engine, so it does not die after the game isn’t sold any more. The big engines are into development for many years and used by a plethora of titles. Only very few developers can effort to create their own engine from scratch, everyone else is licensing one of the few big engines for lots of cash. Using and improving Open Source engines can be a good alternative to save money, especially for independent game developers, just like applications like the Gimp are a good enough alternative for many people who don’t want to buy Photoshop. And it’s not like current Open Source engines are infinitely superior to the latest and greatest. Tenebrea for example had realtime lighting long before Doom 3 was even leaked. Of course no OSS engine can compete with Doom 3 right now, but development is going well.

Try to write the article again and assume that a developer would keep all the content proprietary, only basing the game on Open Source engine code. I’m sure you won’t find any reason why it shouldn’t work as well (or even better) than any other Open Source project.

Another advantage of Open Source engines is, that it makes it feasable again to focus on content instead of technology. I don’t care for modern single player games anymore, because they almost entirely feel shallow compared to the epic role playing games or starflight sims which I enjoyed so much in my early years of computing. Today it seems that a game like this stands no chance to succeed, because it will be oudated already when it ships and won’t justify the immense cost of creating so much content. Wizardry 8 was the last example of such a game which I can think of, and it was the financial death for the developers. Who knows what would have happened if they had based their work on Open Source technology.

Aside from money and development time, there are further advantages to Open Source technology for games, like:

– People will port it to different plattforms, you don’t necessarily need to pay anyone to do it.

– Bugs can be found and fixed by everyone.

– The technology keeps developing and games based on it will be able to make use of all the improvements, which should increase their lifetimes. Games like Quake or even Doom still run reasonably well today because the community has improved their engines and id is actually still selling them, despite the source being released!

I have a lot of hopes for Open Source games because I got so disappointed with current games and I’m also hoping for more Linux ports this way.

Recently I discovered the first game which follows this philosophy and yes, it’s an epic role playing game. It’s called “Minions of Mirth” and its website is http://www.prairiegames.com/ . The game is based on an improved Quake 2 engine and looks very promising already. Of course it’s not state of the art graphics, but a game of this scope would be impossible to do with latest technology anyway and it’s still very impressive considering that it’s being developed by only two independent developers on a very tight budget. It promises to provide a lot more content value compared to current games at half the price and I wish them the best of luck. I really hope they’ll finish this title and I hope that it will be just an example of things to come. I’m looking forward to have fun with gaming again.

If you think about it, it just makes sense for independent developers (and not just them in the long run) to sell the content and not the technology. It wouldn’t make sense for id Software, but they were always focused on the technology and not on the content. Doom 3 surprised me in that regard, but I still wouldn’t buy it for 50 Euro just for the single player experience.

Sorry for writing such a long text, but I had those thoughts in my mind for quite a while now and this seemed like a good moment to write them down.

there is a common misconception that over-produced games are better games.

having tried a variety … incl things like doom or grand theft auto vice city … i much prefer the following;

* Ltris <- danger, addictive!

* Lbreakout

* gnuchess / xboard

* frozen bubble <- danger, addictive!

no fancy graphics, no movie sequences, no complex plots .. just simple fun!

2004-09-01 1:40 am

“but there are no comparable original creations in this area”

no, you just haven’t found BzFlag!!

hehe.. mattk, did you read my last paragraph?

Where does Open Source fit in gaming?

Of course there are exceptions to every rule. Open source might not be the best choice for developing the next so-called “AAA level” story-based shooter, but it works pretty well for games with unusually long lifespans. And that is exactly where projects like this have succeeded wildly. Examples include BZFlag, FreeCiv, and FrozenBubble

2004-09-01 1:42 am

The whole discussion is silly. The subject is so vague and subjective. “Good…” come on. Eugenia and some of the rest of the lot here should be saying “Graphically advanced.” There’s PROs and CONs to both sides. One side is more graphically advanced and more hyped/marketed, while the other [in some cases] is more advanced in respect to replay value and theme. I cannot imagine many people from either side would honestly say that there have been many truely innovative closed source games that also have great replay value coming out lately. Some people think free games with simple graphics and longer replay value is “good” and “better.” Some people think it’s “good” and “better” to buy a game with bleeding edge technology which [as of late] may not have a lot of long term worth. Also, open-source models and methods are starting to reach the point where it would be realistically possible to develop an “amazing” (graphically speaking) new game. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but it’s getting there. And before I get shot at… I worked for several years for a company working on and porting console system games between PC and console and between the various consoles themselves. And now I work on various gaming projects in the open source world.

Thanks.

2004-09-01 2:08 am

Flightgear may be a nice attempt, but is nothing compared to MS Flight Simulator or even X-Plane. I for one dont care if a game is open or closed source, but whether or not its any good. At the moment, it seems that closed source companies are making the great games. Is this bad? Not to me, but I suppose open source zealots that view anything closed source as evil will have something to say.

2004-09-01 2:34 am

I have seen many times the discussion around Doom 3. And altough it’s on of the latest and more complex games ever, there are many others for PC, Xbox, PS2 and GC.

NFL2K5, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy, KOTOR, Project Gotham 2 and many others. Are those OSS? Nope. If there were OSS, will be better? I don’t think so. There is a big difference between gaming and OS/Application development. And one of those is that OSS is based on evolving in a slow pace. In the game development it’s based on a short time, and faster development. For what I’m seeing, I don’t think it will change…IMHO

2004-09-01 2:38 am

i see no reason why OSS can’t produce a great game engine (e.g. Doom 3 engine, Half Life 2 engine, etc). but for the game itself — yes, your arguments apply.

so that’s where the commercial application of open source technology can possibly come in: the open source community develops tools/engines for developing games, then people develop games for it. i’m looking forward to such a situation

2004-09-01 2:38 am

There’s a lot of opensource games that I’ve enjoyed playing over the years. However, most of them are remakes of old games and that leads me to the conclusion that most opensource games are made by developers who wants to play their old favourites, perhaps with better graphics or some extra features. There’s sadly not a lot of gamedesigners with fresh new ideas in the OSS world.

New games doesn’t need to be that technically advanced. I mean look at The Sims, it was a very simple game from a technical standpoint even at the time it was introduced, yet it became a bestseller. And look at all those little flash/shockwave games all over the net, a lot of people are crazy about them.

There is a huge market for simple games. Modern games doesn’t have to be heavy 3D-shooters they can just as well be simple puzzle games, but with better graphics than what they had in the 80’s.

Take a simple game like liero, add better graphics and full network support. I would be very popular.

There’s a lot of good games that can be made using the opensource development model. But one problem is that most of the time people with fresh new ideas want to make some money off them. Few people would buy the game if it the sourcecode was available free of charge so there’s not much money to be made.

The only kind of games where that would be possible are those that requires an account on a server to be playable.

But then again, someone would be likely to set up a free server anyway.

People with a great idea for a simple game (like The Sims) is more likely to turn to a commercial softwarehouse than to go to sourceforge and start an opensource project.

BTW, it surprises me that no-one has made any good clones of games like Worms Armageddon and The Sims yet. They would be pretty easy for a small team to clone.

2004-09-01 2:43 am

OSS may not be useful to develop games but I do believe their great to maintain games, there’s lot’s of games that people still want to play but can’t because they don’t work on their new OS/Hardware.

If the game developers released the code has OSS (just the code mind you not game assets or copyright) people could make little fixes that would make these games playable again.

I remember being exited when they released the code for duke nukem 3D since I knew someone would make a version that would work natively in windows and maybe even look better, and guess what I was right :p

2004-09-01 2:49 am

Small point, but important I feel.

People that create games don’t get much out of playing the games they create.

Dunno how many of you have ever sat down and made a game, but I can testify that it’s incredibly dull to play for the creator.

Why?

Because you’ve already spent more time playing it than any sane human being should.

Because you know all the tricks, all the traps, all the storyline. Everything from “Can I jump across that” to “And a monster will jump out…wait…wait…yes, here” is already known.

Simply put there are no surprises left.

A few people have mentioned Nethack. Would you really want to work on the Nethack code? To know all the probabilities, all the devious little secrets, and reduce the entire experience to little more than a dice rolling exercise? Or would you prefer to just play the game?

As I said, it’s just a little point. However I think there is at least something of it in why OSS isn’t doing well at games. People start out wanting to make the greatest game they can, then realise halfway through that they won’t actually get any real enjoyment from playing their creation. Around about that time development ceases.

2004-09-01 2:55 am

Good point. But it mostly applies to games with a storyline. Puzzlegames, boardgames and multiplayer actiongames are a different from that.

However, you might get tired of the game after spending all that time developing it the same way musicians wouldn’t want to listen to their own albums because they spent so much time making them that they’ve grown tired of the songs. Even though many of them created the songs because that’s the kind of music they would like to hear.

pretty ironic.

2004-09-01 2:59 am

Yeah right…

You don’t know games. I play both OSS and CSS games. While OSS games can be great fun, most (not all) of them are just simple games.

So what? They are still games.

Some are looking for games that will give them a complete experience. Others just want to have plain fun. I still play 8-bit era games and some of them are more fun to me than newer ones requiring 400$ video cards and 5.1 sound. But that is my opinion… and probably the opinion of the one to who you have replied to.

Now, I do enjoy some eyecandy! I’d rather play with a 3D remake version of the 8-bit game than playing the original with poor control and everything. I am a bit nostalgic but not completely retro. I just won’t choose a game over another one because of graphic and sound. And while there are many good games these days, too many are simply focused on these things (IMO).

2004-09-01 3:12 am

While the base for many mods is in fact commercial, a lot of effort has been made over the years towards the creation of mods for those existing games, and many of those mods are open source.

I suspect a certain amount of the effort that might otherwise be spent writing original open source game software is currently being spent on making modifications to existing commercial games.

Just a thought, anyway…

2004-09-01 3:31 am

I believe that an open source first person shooter engine that would be modable like Half-Life would be ideal for OSS.

2004-09-01 3:51 am

This is nothing more then a rant on OSS. The article does a better job of illustrating the problems in Game Development in general. I’ve only seen OSS used very rarely in games, such as in using ogg for sound or open sourcing an old engine. Currently the problem with games are aging standards, aging graphic technology, the complexity of 3d editing and toolkits to base games upon.

2004-09-01 4:19 am

If it is software, it can be done in free and open source development. The reason there are no world class open source games is simple. There is no need for open source world class games.

There is no open source gaming development community. Games are for recreational and entertaining purposes only. Free and open source development focus on productivity and development software, not recreational and entertaining software.

Don’t expect a DOOM3 killer anytime soon on the free and open source front. Well, not until there is a rabid, radical and fanatical emergence of a gaming community and followers.

Do you folks remember 7 years ago when they said free/open source will never be as good as Windows or Macintosh on the desktop front? Deja vu all over again.

My point is, when the development infrastructures are in place, you’ll see these world class games, yes even in

Writing good software, including games, doesn’t necessarily mean you overflowing rivers of cash. It just means you have a talented team. Give me a plot writer, a mathematician, a software engineer and an artist. There you go, a recipe for a great game. In the free/open source environment, you have people who are all four of them.

Why don’t they write games, you say? Because it’s not worth it. The commercial games out there are doing a fantastic job. When this games start sucking, or when they start forcing to pay for unnecessary upgrades, or when you have to activate them online to play them, or when they start incorporating DRM such that you can only play them on one machine. In short, when commercial game developers start insulting your intelligence over your freedom, then we’ll begin to see our first world class free/open source development platform.

That’s how KDE/GNOME/XFCE/Enlightenment all started. And I remember the nay sayers even back then saying, “It CAN NEVER BE DONE.” It can! Free/Open source is just better off writing productivity software. Now isn’t that logical?

/ramble

2004-09-01 4:33 am

I’d probably agree that open source games will never be as good as commercial games. Not if you go and compare tux racer to something like half life 2. But then like mystilleef says, there’s not really a need for open source games. Even so, there’s still some great stuff out there. Triple A is probably my favorite: http://triplea.sf.net

2004-09-01 4:35 am

Thank you for re-iterating the point of the article.. How useful.

2004-09-01 4:37 am

I think the statement that games are played once and then tossed to the side is a completely bogus observation. Sure, some people might establish an insatiable need for something new, but it is certainly not the standard. My wife still plays Age of Empires II almost every week, for the last four years! I cannot pry it away from her authoritative hands. Just tonight at the mall I watched an entire hurd of young males gathered around a console playing 16 bit video games, all trying to get a chance in the driver’s seat. Games don’t just disappear. They are a very big part of who we are, especially those of us who grew up with the technology.

I am not going to argue for closed sourced games or open sourced games. All I am saying is, don’t write the games off. Any game created will never be unmade. Now, if you can excuse me, I have to get back to my game of Maelstrom!

2004-09-01 4:50 am

I believe that an open source first person shooter engine that would be modable like Half-Life would be ideal for OSS.

Quake 3 is going Open Source soon and that engine is much more advanced than Half Life, apart from sceletal animation.

There is also Dark Places[1], which is build from the Quake 1 Source and has features that even Quake 3 doesn’t have, like sceletal animation, bump mapping and realtime shadows (like Doom 3).

A very interesting project is Nexuiz[2], which is a (most likely) free deathmatch game which runs on the Dark Places engine, so there we’ll have a completely free and Open Source game as a base for our mods, which will most likely keep improving at a steady pace (unlike closed source games, which are usually stuck more or less at the state at which they are released).

I think that very exciting times lie ahead for Open Source gaming and modding.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare the state of open source gaming with new releases like Doom3 or Black Hawk Down. But even so, there are no open source games even comparable to five or ten year old titles like Outlaws, Myst, System Shock 2, BladeRunner, or Interstate ’76. There just aren’t…

There really aren’t even many that are up to par with later DOS games such as Carmageddon, Aces of the Deep, or WWII GI.

There are many Freeware (closed source) Windows games that I gladly allow to waste my time: Fiend, Roll’m Up/Pool’m Up, Outbound, and different space racing games. There’s no reason why open source can’t be at least that good!

With a few exceptions, open source gaming (and original Linux gaming) is comparable to 8-bit console gaming – checkers, tiles and cards, RPG, scrolling shooters, etc.

TuxRacer was pretty good, at least the Windows version. The Linux version crawled along at something near 1 fps. And Chromium looks good although I’ve never been able to actually play because of the excruciating frame rate, not even slightly playable. Which brings me to another point. When discussing Open Source the conversation usually revolves around Linux. However getting decent graphics on Linux has always been a problem – it just plain sucks.

many many games that are commercial and crossplattform relies on open-source libraries such as sdl.

but what about neverball? billardgl? vegastrike?

and what about not-so-nice-looking games?

and frozen bubble? and tux-racer before it went commercial?

2004-09-01 5:30 am

It’s all we can do now to grab stuff the office A.I. and Aleph corroborate on and ship it out the door before they intellectualize it.

Great Concepts are neat for games; they tend to educate, and Barbie (Mattel Barbie) is making strong book on what I hope are much more edifying works than I’m willing to camp at WalMart investigating. What sells me is having a really solid performance on whatever the hardware of the day is.

Yeah, color ANSI works for me, but from a requirements standpoint, I need to have a decent love interest or a good Eclipse environment bundled in there for 2004. Something under 400W would be a bonus:

There may even be good cellphone games made commercially. But I like 5.1 to 7.1 EAX sound, an appropriately large immersive display, force-feedback someplace, and other things to suggest I shouldn’t just actually go walkabout. These things aren’t keenly prosecuted into the OS (sort of a game by itself; what’s my screensaver daemon hiding in today, kdm?)

They might be keenly set up in our OS (the open interfaces of the cellphone, whatever) if another product of the videogame design process, the asset and compensation management er…VCS, were endowed with real credit (er, capabilities, really) systems.

Let’s walk though this one a bit using a handy PA example. Let’s say PenPen makes 24MiB worth of graphical assets towards whatever their personalized feed digested from the hulking XML design document, and gets vested NabooZM$42,000 as people confirm it into the digestion process of say, NabooZM$403,000 (incl. expenses and initial exposure) of VCS work. [Yes, it’s already kind of alien.] The VCS is busy guaranteeing that spec assets remain usable, meeting with VCs, and sort of cheapening OSS by guaranteeing that the combined suite of assets is closed to people outside license and capabilities contracts (in NabooZM$.) In fact it’s probably releasing some pretty cheesy titles in order to back up the NabooZM$8M fielding the real work in progress. It’s all one sigma harder for everyone who eventually takes an ad buy, because they want assurances that Gnomovision and the VCS’s corporation aren’t paying them in mostly NabooZM$, and people who are trying hard enough to drop their OSS cryptoball in the clear find themselves out actual semi-hard currency, and still have to throw down for the non-demo version with 3 DVDs of source.

At this point, the VCS has made book and is buying governorships handing out NabooZM$ contracts it controls.

…anyone seen the rest of this one? It doesn’t end like the Animatrix.

Well, that or some other method makes it fungible and an advertisable release, which sells massive hardware.

Thanks everyone who mentioned new OSS games! I think it’s clear that games produce OSS as a sideproduct so far, but that wrapping the office Tyro who makes things happen in ESR’s skin will throw an exception.

[Everyone walks around their chair twice, face in hands, shouting “I know who I am! I know who I am!”]

2004-09-01 5:34 am

>TuxRacer was pretty good, at least the Windows version. The

>Linux version crawled along at something near 1 fps. And

>Chromium looks good although I’ve never been able to actually

>play because of the excruciating frame rate, not even

>slightly playable. Which brings me to another point. When discussing Open Source the conversation usually revolves

>around Linux. However getting decent graphics on Linux has

> always been a problem – it just plain sucks.

Bob,

Have you ever heard of 3D drivers? It seems you missed those on your Linux system where you where trying Chromium and Tuxracer. Shame.

2004-09-01 5:45 am

It’s hardly even worth discussing. Most people in this forum including Eugenia know little to nothing about creating games, despite what they say.

Here is something that is much more relevant

In both the free and commercial game development world around 99% of games do not make it to completion (Talking of PC games here). In the free world this leaves a lot of dead looking projects. In the commercial world this leads to loss in profits.

Why? (My Take)

In free development it is hard (as people have mentioned) to keep momentum up for the period of game development which can last anywhere from 6 weeks to over 7 years. Also (as people have mentioned) it is hard to get good artists for a free software project.

In commercial projects the problem is in project management and publisher pressure. Projects are forced into the development phase without proper design. This can cause project failures or crappy games as the programmers rush to meet impossible deadlines set by the publishers. This is due to the need of getting your game on the shelf (you need that publisher) so you do what they say. The industry itself admits this, you can read postmortem after postmortem on Gamasutra and they all say similar things “bad management”, “too rushed at the end” and “we rebuilt everything from scratch maybe we shoudln’t have”.

Another failing of the commercial game industry is me-tooism or sequel-ism. Because of the lack of quality control, game purchasers go with what they know and that is the old game redone. DOOM III anyone? This leads to stagnation in new game ideas, during the 80’s there where a lot more different games being published. Now days there are few.

Now a lot of people have pointed the finger at the free projects for being me-toos but you might consider that a me-too game has a much higher chance of being completed using any development model, because we already know what the game is. We can reuse concepts, maybe even artwork or the engine.

Free game development does have a lot of great game ideas but they never get realised because the focus is not in new areas. And therefore the amount of developers is in new areas. You need enough focused developers to hurdle the 99% hence few new concept games.

Something that the game industry could learn from the free developers is code-reuse. Many a commercial game crashes due to problems with the game engine that was built specifically for this new game. Because of “The not built here syndrome”, almost every commercial game is built from scratch, when often an update to the old engine (assuming it was documented and designed right) could have been used instead. This wastes development time and causes new bugs (This also I have heard from other game developers)

Something that both free and commercial game development could use is a proper design phase at the start and good team leadership to encourage everyone to finish. Free will take off when there are more developers and there are always more developers because people love game programming and having completed a free project can look excellent on your resume. The commercial industry would need to take a deep crash before it sorts out its problems and that is not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

There space for both commercial and free game development in this world and both will keep growing. You will always see more games, that is inevitable.

I have to disagree with the author. I believe OSS completely makes sense for gaming. Look at typical Windows games. People finish them fast and then start looking for add-ons. That’s where OSS has a card to play. Once you’ve got an engine, you can do all the add-ons you want. The Quake 3 engine has been used in a lot of games, licensed to third parties, tuned for some games, etc. The engine has been here for years and is still quite good today.

I don’t think that developpers have to throw away all their old work each 2 years. An FPS is still an FPS. You have more detailed textures, more polygons, shaders, but it’s basically the same. With an OSS game, each time the engine add features, extensions and optimisations people can upgrade their add-ons, release new levels, etc.

Finally, in closed source games like in any other closed source software the editor often does not give the user what he really wants because, well, that can be sold separately in second game. Marketing first, users second. Look at the FIFA games. One per year. Innovations? Some graphical improvements, updated teams. That’s all. During the last world cup they even released THREE games dedicated to it. Innovations? Zero.

2004-09-01 6:56 am

It seems that the original article makes the assumption that big budget games with rich graphics, animation, background music, etc. are automatically good and games without the benefit of such a budget are automatically not good. With such a limited viewpoint, it’s not surprising to conclude that there probably won’t be any “good” OSS games anytime soon. Many of the critical comments seem to be addressing (in various words) the assumption that big budget equals good, and that’s why terms like “playability” and “gameplay” are being tossed around and old classics still-in-development like NetHack and XConq are being named on the OSS side.

If big budget really guarantees goodness, why do some big budget movies (like “Catwoman” or “Gigli”) suck? If little budgets make it impossible to have a good product, why are small budget movies sometimes pretty good (like “El Mariachi” or “Blair Witch Project”)? The most that can really be said is that it’s easier to make a good product with a bigger budget — there is definitely nothing that precludes making a good product with a small budget, and there’s certainly no guarantees against making a turkey with a big one.

The observations here,every now and then I’m pleasantly surprised by an open source game,Case in point is Frozen Bubble. This is the most addictive and beautifully designed piece of work I have seen in many a moon.Granted It’s no Super-Duper 3D ShootEmUp Tour De Force,just a simple shooting gallery type game that combines elements of pool and pinball.But seeing this game I can envision a version of it running on those little bar top video machines that seem to be the rage,at the local bars,with people pumping quarter after quarter into it,knocking down the pretty colored balls!

2004-09-01 7:34 am

All useful and relevant OS apps were born because there’s a need for it. Once they’re released, they go through an ever evolving SDLC for one reason only; making it better.

Why OS games will never be as robust as other OS apps is only because of one reason: the “need” factor. Nobody needs games. For most people, it would be nice to have. For those who actually live and breathe games, a large majority of them couldn’t actually code three lines of simple shell script, let alone a function to render some game character in OpenGL.

The MySQL people started the project because they want a database with certain features. A lot of other people _AND companies_ ($$$) want it too.

Same thing with the Linux kernel, and PHP, and hundreds of OS apps.

The problem with games is that NO COMPANY will want it. What’s in it for these companies anyway? Even if they can sell it, there will be more people downloading it (legally at that). Charge for support? Heck, if the game is popular enough, there will be “community sites” popping up with this purpose in mind.

OS games will be just a hobby to hone the devs’ programming skills. Why would they want to do that? For fun (“because I can!”) and/or profit (“So I can stick it in my resume when applying for that EA job”) mostly.